


There Thou Goest Also

by ellebb



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Gratuitous Theology, Reckless Idiom Usage, The Power Of Friendship (???), Vigilante World Building, death godlike - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-11 21:52:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13533276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellebb/pseuds/ellebb
Summary: Sharp grew up hating the way she looked-- or rather, hating the way others treated her because of her looks.  But her relationship with Berath is more complicated than the pure disdain she pretends to, and her new life in a new continent seems determined to test her so-called lack of faith.





	1. Threshold

**Author's Note:**

> [On Tumblr.](https://ellebeebee.tumblr.com/post/170438678030/there-thou-goest-also)

Sharp got her sea-legs after a few days.  A relief, but also an irony since she was born by the sheer cliffs of a seaside town.  Yet that was a black ocean that strangled with its barren hostility.  This ocean bore their ship up on strong rolling hills and surging valleys-- full of promise and vigor.  So it took a few days, but she did overcome the roil of her stomach and the wobble in her legs.   **  
**

What she did not get used to-- would never get used to-- stalked her up and down the decks.  Through the mess and to her cabin door.  Made her smoky trails  _itch_.

On the second week of the journey Sharp found his cabin, extinguished the nearby sconces, and leaned against the wall for a couple hours after breakfast.  He came down the stairs, no wider than a hand’s span, and made so much noise with his heavy steps tangling in his long robes you’d think he was four times his size.  He didn’t even check the hall before descending; she’d have called him an easy mark in her previous life.  If he were of any consequence at all in the greater scheme of things.

Beyond being a nuisance to her, of course.

He got all the way to only a few strides from his door before he froze at the sight of her.  

She pushed from the wall and rolled down the hall on the balls of her boots.  His neck craned further and further back as she advanced.  The dwarf’s mouth went slack and his eyes widened.  She knew he could only make out a vague outline of her-- her height over him and the dark crown of her head-growth-- with what little light seeped down from the stair hatch into the hall’s deep shadows.

“You--” the dwarf managed.

Her hand shot forward.  The skull embroidered into the silk of his robes crumpled in her fist as she jerked him toward her, breaking his balance.  She kept the robes biting beneath his armpits without quite pulling him off his feet.

“I do not give a fuck what you think I am, priest,” Sharp finally said.  Her haze writhed over her neck, reaching toward his twitching cheeks. “I do not care if you think I am blessed by your blighted god.  Stop staring at me, you shitheel.”

He inhaled.  His cheeks still twitched, but his tongue came loose. “Why do you deny the gifts--”

“No!” she interjected. “No words!  I will not spend the rest of this journey stalked by your leers.  I am not holy, and trust me, you do not want me to prove to you just how unholy I can be.”

She shook him a bit for emphasis, fully lifted him off the splintered deck flooring, and spun about to switch their positions.  He stumbled as she threw him back on his feet, toward his cabin door.  Her own feet found the thin stair step easily, quietly.

But she stopped when he spoke.

“You squander the grace of the Twinned God at your peril!  We all come to the Wheel in our time, and to pay the toll without fulfilling--”

Sharp whirled and snarled.  He stumbled away again and disappeared behind his door with a clatter.

They made the journey to the Dyrwood with a minimum of that staring she’d been so annoyed by, though she could tell every time their gazes briefly met that his words sat barely contained on the tip of his tongue.

-

“You’re a fool, Watcher.”

They’d decided to camp for the night in the main hall of the ruined old keep and laid out bedrolls beneath the splintered and cobwebbed beams.  Durance loomed over her as she sat on a pile of what had once been a wall with the map draped over her knees.

“Eh?” Sharp said. “My Aedyran is not so good, I am not with the understanding.” Her accent ran her words rhythmic and thick.

His bulbous eyes narrowed. “Don’t play the idiot foreigner with me.  You know what I said.”

She sighed. “I guess this is the part you tell me  _why_ I am a fool now.”

“That broken old mage,” he said, leaning into the twisted knobs of his dark staff, “You had a chance buttress these old walls with his soul.  Create a bulwark against your enemies with his suffering.  Or better yet, imbue yourself with what secrets he stubbornly hoarded, too weak to use them himself.  You could have taken from him what was wasted in his mad and shriveled grasp.”

Somewhere in the midst of this Sharp dug out her pipe.  She usually waited to smoke with Edér, but it looked like this was going to go on for a while.

“Instead, you cast him back onto the Wheel, all his trials forgotten, all the scorches left upon his soul by violence washed away by the world’s tides.”

She held her hand over the pipe’s bowl and puffed, trying to get the spark to take.  Durance’s greasy hair and greasy burnt robes both swung as he leaned further in toward her.  The veins of his fist gripping his staff bulged.  Unnecessarily, she thought, but what did she know about hedge priests and their whore-goddesses?

Caed Nua suited him.  A face marked by time and violence, and walls marked by the same forces.  Hollow foundations falling deep beneath the surface and full of unseen monsters.  Yes, the place suited him more than her.

His wild eyes roved over her. “Are you, beneath your untruths and glib lies, actually moved by those… scars Berath inflicted on your mortal form?”

She frowned at him.  And thought about all the ways she could gut him.

“You owe nothing to that lazy bag of bones,” Durance said. “None of us do.  The grand scheme of the Wheel is all good and well, but Berath gives us nothing.  They do not actually care for humanity and the life of man.  Fate is an excuse for those unwilling to take what they can earn.  For those cowards that will not suffer for real change and transformation.”

He tapped his staff. “Bowing to fate will make you weak, Watcher.  Bowing to Berath--”

Sharp stood. “I have never bowed to the one you call Berath.”

She spat, uncaring her spittle landed near his feet.  She gestured to her head and its crown of dark cartilage. “This?  This is no blessing.  It is some cosmic joke and gives me no debt to any god.”

“And yet you still followed the will of so-called ‘fate,’” he smiled.

She stilled herself, removed the hand she had at her blades and loosened the sudden tightness in her limbs.  Idiot!  He had obviously goaded her into anger and she had fallen for it.  Such a basic mistake in the blood games of her home, of Vailia, could have cost her dearly.

“I do not need your trials and your suffering, priest,” Sharp said quietly, “To know my strength.  I do not need Maerwald’s pain to be a cornerstone of this keep.”

She kicked a fragment of brick and sent it clattering over the cracked tiles. “The place reeks enough without his sweat.”

She stalked away, ending the conversation.  Durance was wrong.  His goddess was wrong.  Suffering was just as like to baptise a man to emerge as a beast as-- as-- shit, who knew.  Some fiery truth-speaker and champion.  Or whatever it was that Durance was conniving to turn her into.  Pain did not elevate kith.  She had seen it herself.  Pain was just as like to make you turn on your friends and loved ones.  To say, well, they were just weak and unworthy!  How convenient.

No.  Kith toiled in this world for a time, and that was it.

Sharp frowned down into her pipe; she’d let it go cold.  That line of thinking bothered her.  It was too close to those disciples of Cirono, always watching her, expecting something.  Why  _had_  she given Maerwald back to the Wheel?

Shit, what did it matter.  She kicked another brick.

-

The dreams sometimes took her beyond the towering machine seen through a fever fog.  Further down, down and down.

The white-yellow sun pricked relentlessly at her shoulders.  Her seat beneath the jagged bare tree gazed on one side off down the main road into the village and its red-tiled roofs, and on the other toward the brown grass that dropped off at the edge of mottled cliffs.  Black sea-water and salty froth lashed at the sheer rock.

At the very edge of town a group of men and women in pale and practical tunics, aprons, and skirts hefted a large cotton-wrapped bundle over their shoulders.  From the maze of plastered walls behind them, a man in black silk robes darted clumsily after the group.  Even here, high above them and by the cliffs, she could see the sweat gleaming off his face.

When the priest reached them, the group halted.  Words were exchanged.  The conversation dragged.  Got heated, from the way a few villagers gestured at him, and he raised his voice loud enough to reach her.  Though the words were indistinct.

But she knew anyway.  The old woman had belonged to a family from the outskirts.  Her living in town had been chance.  But the priest should know better.  He was new, from a grand city.

He hadn’t had a chance yet to learn that his god only had a superficial place in this land.  Like the pretty top of a peach left too long, so the underside went black and liquid.

Finally, the tallest shepherdess pushed the priest into the dirt, a yellow cloud wafting up from beneath him.  The group left him squawking in their wake.

She stood.  She’d cut across the common pastures to get back to the palace.  She didn’t look back to see if they would sign against the sight of her, or even ask her to help them with what they did to the body.


	2. Faces

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [On Tumblr.](https://ellebeebee.tumblr.com/post/170477478385/there-thou-goest-also)

“My family is like his, I guess,” Sharp said and gestured at Aloth.  Aloth blinked. “My mother-- She came from a long line of fencing masters that served the Marceso mes Scalone.  Loyal retainers with a pedigree as old as the marcesos.  She met my father when she was already in her middle years, so when she had me--”

She reached up, the long trails of black smoke following and curling around her fingers, and she touched the edge of her broad head-growth.  The splayed wedges nearly spanned the same width as her shoulders, resembling a helmet or a tricorn.  Her dark purple-blue fingers tapped the side that had a hole in the corner: a bullet wound the diameter of a finger with pale scars roping around it.

Across the fire, Pallegina’s nictitating membranes swept over her gleaming eyes.

“She died in childbirth.  My father raised me.  He took my mother’s name-- mes Draghi-- and served the marceso in her stead.  I lived in the palace there-- in that tiny city by the black sea-- until I was fourteen.”

She poked at the popping embers with a stick. “I left-- You have to know-- that land is old.  Isolated from the  _cuiteti bels_  and the great ducs.  It took longer than most for the gods to come there.  The big ones.  You know.  Woedica and so on.  But there they still worship an old-- eh, what is the word… The god, but not that god?  Same, but not?”

“Aspect?  An aspect of a god?” Kana said.

“I think?  Anyway.  Cirono, but not.  Older some say, but I do not know.  They call her the Padhessa-- the Shepherdess.  She comes as an old woman in peasant clothes.  But she has the head of a great ewe-- with broad horns covered in scars.  In one hand she carries a heavy crook, in the other a culling knife.”

“I have never--” Kana started, one hand digging into the pack beside him for parchment. “How far is this Shepherdess worshipped?  What sort of rituals--”

Sharp gave him a sightless gaze, with a bit of a tightness in her mouth.

“Ah.  Questions for later.  I think.”

“The villagers put up with me growing up.  Some were worse than others, but,” she shrugged. “I did not think much of it until I left.  Until I had to leave.”

Pallegina sighed. “These backward little pits in the far reaches of the world are all the same, aren’t they?”

Sharp kept poking at the fire. “The Padhessa.  There is a festival each year, and an ewe that will bear no more lambs is sacrificed before all.  She is strung up and her throat slit.  It is not something rich, or-- the shepherds, it is a common thing for them.  But the point is, the Padhessa comes for us all.  She knows when our time is fulfilled, when our purpose in this world is spent.  And she comes to cull us.  So we give thanks to that, and offer her the old, spent ewe.”

The night pressed around them. “Like I said, I did not think much of the villagers.  Spat back at them when they spat at me.  But when I turned fourteen, I was ambushed on a path I had used hundreds of times.  I was hooded and dragged to what turned out to be a very, very old cave.  Carvings, and… And there were people, so many people.  And I did not have to see to know.  I could recognize their voices and their steps.  The smell.  They all smell like sheep, those villagers.”

She paused. “They wanted to sacrifice me.”

Aloth leaned forward, whites of his eyes wide. “Merely because you are a godlike?”

“No,” Sharp said, then frowned. “I mean, yes, that-- I was touched by death and supposedly blessed.  A very nice gift to the Padhessa, no?  But also… Well.  You know.”

Her frown deepened at the blank looks.

“Do I have to count it out--”

“Spell it out.”

“Do I have to spell it out for you?” she snapped. “I just turned fourteen.  I know that mattered because one of them wished me a happy birthday.  That is usually about the time when girls have their bloods.  But godlike--”

She pitched her poking stick into the campfire. “That barren ewe…”

She shook her head, and strengthened her voice to shake away that chill down her spine she’d been carrying since she was fourteen.  She was not a farm animal; her worth would never be defined by her womb.

“My father and some of the marceso’s men tracked me down and rescued me before anything could happen.  The villagers were punished, and I was sent off to the grand academy for fencing.”

She picked up another stick to poke the fire with, the tightness in her shoulders and arms turning her pokes into stabbings.  Her mouth cut deep into her expression, and her smoke tendrils jerked.

“And that is the story of why I hate priests of Cirono, Berath, whatever you wish to call it-- Padhessa.  It is all the same, and I will not stand that again.  And the staring!  Always the staring… but I am no different from any other kith.  That I should be blessed or who knows what these people think-- It is pig shit!”

Pallegina huffed low in her throat: an amused sound.  She gestured to Sharp. “Here, where is that flask I always see you carrying?  I will drink to that.”

“I think we could all do with a drink,” Edér exhaled, pulling out his own flask.

The tension was cut, and they spent the night passing the flasks around while discussing the universal inbred stupidity of superstitious backwaters.

-

She was a teenager again, just graduated from the academy and plucked up by the Fioriza family’s merc company.

The city tangles and weaves its secrets from the lowest pauper up to the duc himself.  Intrigue and murder are the lifeblood of good society, and nothing--  _nothing_ \-- is more important than to perform with style.  Slaughter the head of a rival family as a guest at his table?  Augh, how distasteful!  But slip him a poison at the duc’s banquet and antagonize him into a duel that he will surely lose?

_Gellarde_!  How amusing!

But she is young and drunk on being the best of her graduating class, on the power she wields as a member of the nobility’s bloodsports.  Dazyad does his best to steer her away from that path of stupidity, but there is only so much you can say to a young braggadocio determined to strut her fine skills.  And Captain Roci certainly does not help.

It is at Roci’s behest that she scores her first kill.  She’d been doing piddly shit for over a year; accompanying Lord Fioriza when he wanted to frighten someone with the silent visage of death at his shoulder.  Extortion, delivering messages underpinned with threats.  But then Roci comes to her and tells her, this woman is dead already.  Go take care of it.

A carpenter.  Refused the lord’s patronage or something, she never really knew.  She sees Sharp and she knows.  You could see it in the widening of her eyes, whites stark against her warm ocher skin, and the just as quick narrowing.  The fight is a mess.  She is not on the fencer’s strip with its gentil rules.  She thought she knew, because she’d been street fighting with the company.  But it is a mess, a clumsy scuffle losing her blade and pawing at each other.

But then she grabs some tool of the woman’s and bangs her on the head.  She falls.  And then Sharp stares and picks up her stiletto.

She remembers clearly the soft and wet wielding of flesh.  The heavy push of the blade.

And she remembers how easy it was in the end, to kill someone for a reason she was not entirely sure of.  Merely because the captain had told her to.  It had seemed right at the time.

-

After the tower she thinks and dreams about that carpenter a lot.  She thinks about the other lives she’d taken.  She felt more annoyed by Aloth than usual.  She was short with him.  It’s not that he didn’t notice; he was too sensitive to not.  But he didn’t say anything, just looked vaguely wounded.

Finally she just burst it out.

“You think it was right, then?” she demanded.  She knelt beside him on a sunny patch of grass by the adra fingers in Caed Nua.

He blinked at her.  “What?”

“Teir Nowneth.”

She balanced on the heels of her boots and pressed her lips thin.  Aloth looked away, doing that thing where he puts his words together with tentative care.  He ran his thumb over the pages of the book in his lap.

“If my encouragement had any part in your decision, then I can only explain again my reasoning: that machine was evil.  It had no purpose other than to inflict evil on the world.  It enslaved thousands-- perhaps millions-- for the express service of those masters who had no care other than their own wills.  So, yes.  I believe we did right.  But if you think I unduly swayed your opinion…”

Sharp waved a hand dismissively. “No, I agree.  Do not tell Hiravias, but I think the Engwithans were as shit as kith.  But the souls we destroyed…” She ducked her head. “I keep thinking about them…”

She felt his eyes on her.  Her smoke lashed at her neck and collarbone.  For whatever reason, Aloth flushed over a tight and crooked mouth.  She did not often lack confidence, and neither did he often drop the cultured mask.

“I see.  I, personally, think it was… necessary.  Unfortunate, but--”

“Unfortunate?” Sharp snapped. “Thousands of souls, just--  _gone_.  Just-- dust, nothing.  Cut from the world-- Just…”

Aloth shifted. “I did not mean it was not a great tragedy.  But what if someone had come along without your scruples?  We may have prevented another such tragedy.  It is brutal mathematics, but…”

“Scruples?”

“Morals.  Sense of right and wrong.”

She frowned, and rocked on her heels. “This is…I do not know.  I have killed a lot of people, you know.  Sometimes they did not deserve it.  But I…” She stared sightlessly at him, and through him. “I have never been so bothered this way.  That is wrong, no?  Even if you say: their souls are still here, to be reborn, but… But that is no excuse, yes?  You cannot use the Wheel to do as you like?”

She regarded him.  And he felt a pressure that he rarely ever did; the asking for his opinion and assurance.  And it felt uncomfortable.  Ill-fitting.  Their Watcher was a fearless smirk, a deadly unseen blade.  He partly felt responsible, because he  _had_ advised her to destroy the tower.  But what did he say to her, the woman who previously had seemed to know exactly who she was?

“I do not believe you are as unbothered as you say by the people you’ve killed,” Aloth said. “As for the way you feel about the souls in Teir Nowneth… I am unsure what to say.  I can only think that you averted future exploitations, and I personally think that grave sacrifice was ultimately worth it.”

“That is easy for you to say,” Sharp snapped.  She stood, looming over him. “It was not your hand that touched the machine and did it!”

He blinked up at her, and she deflated, fists unclenching.

“Sorry,” she bit out. “It bothers me.  And it bothers me that it bothers me.”

He did not know what to say.  He was never very good at these sorts of conversations. “I am… sorry… Sharp.  I do not know…”

She shook her head.  If her face could flush and sweat beneath the flesh-mask, it would.

“Not mind,” she said.

“Never mind,” he automatically corrected.

She shrugged and turned away, walking up towards Brighthollow as he watched.

-

She hated dreaming now.

She never dreamt much before, but now the few times she could drift off she dreamed.  And she hated it.  It was either Iovara and Thaos and the cult-- or it was the old company.

Reka, with her nights down by the wharf and her constant threats to leave for the sea’s embrace.   Sepete who took her fencer’s feet and made them light enough to walk on clouds.  Bo Boesen who taught her the sleight of hand of a street charlatan.  Martezzo, who had given her the nickname: Sharp.

And Dazyad.

All the others, and she dreamed their souls were scooped out bit by bit and devoured by a dark beast, forced to bash their own brains out against an animancer’s roaring machine.

Dissolved into dust and denied a path into the next cycle.

Even though she knew this was not the case-- still.

She dreamed even deeper, and felt the sear of white sun on her shoulders.  The salt and decaying fish reek that moldered on the air over the knife-like crags and hills.  The feel of chalk powder thickening in the lines of her palms after drawing the sparring circles on the crumbling courtyard stones.  That particular whirring sound of whipping about the flexible blade of an épée.

The ponderous swing of the ewe’s corpse hanging from the barn lintel.  The shepherd’s ritual-colored eyes as he approached with the culling knife.  The torrent of blood as her throat was slit, and the chiming music as the liquid pours into the big tin basin beneath it.  The iron smell mixing with the deep stink of livestock offal.

She was that ewe, bound and hooded and swinging upside down from her ankles.  But she was not done.  She had not yet fulfilled her portion of this life.

It wasn’t right.

She felt the roads of the beyond between her fingers like the dry-husk grasses of a rocky pasture.  They varied in length and happiness and wealth.  They wound and curved away from each other, nearing and veering away, and only intersecting in their ultimate destination.

Life was a matter of chance.  Kith were kith no matter the place and time.  The only constant was death.

But then she was swinging again and her calm became terror, and she could smell blood--


	3. Wheel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [On Tumblr.](https://ellebeebee.tumblr.com/post/170513881655/there-thou-goest-also)

“Come on,” Hiravias cajoled. “We’re just talking, okay?  Let me play the heretic’s advocate.” **  
**

Sharp toed at the crumbling wagon rut in the road.  She looked at him walking on the other side.

“… Eh, what?  My Aedyran is not so good.  I am not with the understanding.”

He kicked a rock at her which she easily jumped over to avoid.

“That joke was only funny the first hundred times,” he said.

She exhaled in a great overdone gust of breath. “I would rather not.”

“Don’t be such a fucking coward.  It’s just words.  You, dark-stabby-scion-of-woooo-death-- scared of some words?  C’mon.”

“Big words for such a small man.”

“Who said I’m small everywhere?”

“Yes?  Prove it.  And none of this growing pigshit.”

Hiravias’s hands flew to cover the crotch of his breeches with his eyes wide, aghast. “How dare you?!  I am a decent young man from an upstanding family, you hussy!”

Sharp kicked a cloud of dust over him.  He coughed and swatted at the air.

“Oh sure,” he wheezed. “Abuse the Glanfathan orlan.  It’s fine.  My people are used to it.  We know how to endure atrocities after centuries of persecution.”

She waited until his theatrics of hacking and slapping at his clothes petered off. “I do not see why you are the heretic here.”

“Because,” he said.  His voice lost the playful high edge, and deepened.  He stared at her with his good eye, the cat pupil following the curls of black smoke.

She scowled. “I said before--”

“Yeah, yeah,” he waved at her.  He put on a foolish Vailian accent: “I hate that bastard Cirono!  They ruined my life, stole my girlfriend, and killed my dog!  Eh, Pallegina, what is the word--”

She flung a hand at his head in a backhand, which he easily ducked under.

“Come on, Watcher.  You can’t act like you haven’t been getting all ruffled and personally offended every time we find someone sucking the soul out of some dumb asshole’s nostril or whatever.  Using it to fix his broken prick.” He watched her continue walking in expressionless silence. “Defying the Wheel and upsetting the natural order.”

“Fine!  If it will get you to shut up.”

Hiravias rubbed his hands with relish. “Alright.  What’s the point?  You die, be reborn, die, blah blah blah-- but what does it mean?  Present company excluded, you forget and never keep the lessons you learned before.  Is it just an endless cycle of putting up with the harrows of life just so you can die and go through it again?”

“Does your staelgar ask, why hunt?  Why breed, why do anything?” Sharp said.  She nodded ahead of them where Edér walked with the hound at his heel. “My dog-- I could decide one day to kill her.  And she would never question it or know why.  Your Wael would not agree, but why wonder at the things beyond our understanding?  It will not make a difference.”

“So we just go along, not questioning anything?  Accepting everything we’re given?  Never look for purpose or reason?  Why give kith reason and desire for purpose if we aren’t supposed to look for it?  Also, I’m telling Edér about your murderous intentions toward the dog.”

She ignored the last. “Yes, we endure.  The no answers is part of it.  Besides, you speak as if the life itself is not of worth.  Are there conditions to being worth living?  Does the cycle let some pass before others?  No.”

“But just because we all die doesn’t make our lives worthwhile.”

“No?”

“Hell no.  Some people are really a waste of life.”

“This is your Galawain, no?”

“And Wael,” Hiravias said.  He studied her, then shrugged. “I guess that’s a point we’ll have to agree to disagree on.  That’s a surprise, though.  You of all people being so-- nice.  Benevolent.”

“I said life was its own worth.  Not that I mind to send people on to their next one.”

“Okay.  Next point.  Why don’t we just kill ourselves then?  Restart the cycle if that’s the point.”

“But that is not the point.  There is none.”

“But then why do some lives last longer, if all are worthwhile?”

“Length has nothing to do with worth-- and no, I do not care to hear your dick joke.”

“Hey, you brought it up,” Hiravias said, grinning. “Next bit-- if the length of life has no bearing, then why care whether people deliberately lengthen theirs?  It is, after all, turning into a particular annoyance of yours.”

Sharp frowned.  She had the feeling she was being led around by the nose in this conversation.  It was not a dance she knew well, this theology.  Debate for her had generally only gone so far as trash talk before a fight.  That had been before Hiravias going all inquisitive on the state of her spirituality.  Annoying little man.

She was especially annoyed because she knew he had the better of her in this.

Hiravias continued. “For example.  What’s the difference between using a healing spell, and say, those that use machines like Teir Nowneth?  What makes one perfectly moral and the other an offense against the Wheel?  They both extend a life and keep you from dying.”

No, no.  Wait.  That was not…  She struggled internally against his reasonable words.  It was beyond clear to her that one was right and the other wrong, but the  _why_  of it was difficult to verbalize.

“No-- no, one you only use your own power that will soon return; the other you make a victim of the one you stole the soul from.  You keep both yours and the victim’s soul from the Wheel, and break the balance of the world’s cycle.”

“And what of Concelhaut?” he followed quickly, as if expecting her answer. “His method of cheating death was the phylactery in his skull.”

“He wanted to suck  _my_  soul out and poke at it for his precious spells.”

“Well, forget about that for the moment.  What if he hadn’t wanted your soul and attacked you?  What if you just came upon that old bag of bones and his unnaturally long life?  You still would have wanted to kill him, wouldn’t you?”

“He likely had stolen his own share of souls we did not know about.”

“Don’t avoid the question--”

“Yes!” she snapped. “Yes, I would have.  He was a vile thing.  Deformed and ruined.  You did not see his soul, Hiravias.  It was…”

She shook her head.

“And the Devil?  Don’t act like I haven’t seen you looking at her, all contemplative and wondering just how to release her from that bronze can.”

She said nothing for a long moment while he stared at her intently. “… I do not much care about her past, but she is suffering in that thing.  Her soul not in this world nor the next.  I would kill Galvino but that he might have knowledge of taking her apart.”

Hiravias paused.  They had drifted the back of the group; pink and orange crept up from the horizon and the shadows laid long.  The others were still moving ahead some distance down the road.  He tilted his head and said his next words without venom.

“But what gives you the right?  How can you decide when they’ve overstayed their welcome?”

“I do not--”

Her words halted and she felt an uneasy tide in her stomach.  Her fingers spasmed and jerked together nervously.  Hiravias looked up at her with his cat-like eye gone bright in the waning light.  The feeling of being led about by the nose, of being  _hunted_  intensified.  She knew how to track a mark through the knotted streets of a pitch dark city.  She knew how to make a point by slicing a target just so that they would bleed out a horrific mess for someone to find.  She knew how to lure an opponent down the strip, their blades skipping in metallic kisses, and drop into the most elegant  _passata sotto_.

But this was unfamiliar to her, and damn Hiravias for knowing it too.

“…You want me to say because my god is guiding me, then I have the right,” she said. “That I have been following divine will all along.  This, I can not say.  My actions are my own.  I alone am responsible for what I do.”

He shook his head. “It’s not so much using a god as an excuse.  I think it’s more finding your path in life and using that god to remind you of your way.  It’s unavoidable that someone’s gonna disagree with what you do; even the gods fight amongst themselves.  But you stick to your path because, well, that’s what you believe in.  That’s what strikes you to the core.”

She was silent.  He gave her a side-eyed look.

“And sometimes-- your god gives you a sign to let you know--”

“Augh!  Enough about my head!  I have had a life’s worth of people telling me it’s a  _sign_.” She turned and hurried up the path.  The group was nearly out of sight now, and looked like they had stopped, waiting for them. “I would rather have the dick jokes back!”

“Fine, you’ve heard enough about Berath, but you know your Shepherdess?  Have I ever told you that she sounds more like an aspect of Eothas?  Gaun--”

“No!  I am done with gods and your slippery talk.  You say one more word--”

-

Quirinos mes Draghi tapped on his daughter’s door.  A great clinking velvet purse dangled in his off hand.

A whapping thud on the other side answered him.  He took that as an invitation and swung the door inward.  She stood on top of her mattress with her feet planted wide and a dagger held in her fingers by the blade.  Throwing knives.  A showman’s cheap trick that he disapproved of.  He said nothing, though, and closed the door behind him.  He half expected a crude drawing of one of the shepherds or the village leaders on the other side.  But just the handles of nicked kitchen knives and various daggers stuck out of the wooden door.

She watched him with a slightly wary expression: her mouth set deep and her smoke whirling jerkily.

He sat at the edge of her bed, and after a moment she dropped to a bouncing seat beside him.  She twirled the dagger between her dark purple-blue fingers.

He dropped the purse on her lap. “A gift from the marceso.  He is extremely sorry, dear.”

“I bet he is.”

She pulled the purse’s strings, looked inside.  She grimaced.

Quirinos watched her. “It’s not his fault.  We know whose fault it is.”

Standing, she walked to the door.  Her fingers plucked a knife out of the wood as she said nothing.

“Don’t worry.  The marceso won’t let them go unpunished.”

Internally, he was as furious as she was.  But he couldn’t let her see that now; her mindset and her well-being were more important.

She kept pulling blades out.  Her back stood straight and sure.  He didn’t know the moment when her movement had failed to look childlike to him; although he had no right to be surprised when he’d had so much to do with her training.  The growth-mask seemed less like an adorable hat and more… serious.

“Mirèille,” he said.  She stopped pulling out knives.  Missing just that beat, she tossed them into a jumbled clatter on her desk.  She faced him, tucking her arms behind her.

He rubbed his knee. “I am sorry.  I failed you.”

She said nothing as her chin tucked incrementally.  He could almost read the thoughts whirling in her head, behind that face that he knew so well.

“This was not your fault,” he told her. “It had nothing to do with you.  And everything to do with those crazy inbreds out there.”

“And their god?” she bursted sullenly.

He leaned forward on his elbows, looking at her directly. “No.  That was not the will of the Padhessa, Cirono.  It had nothing to do with the gods.”

She looked aside.

“You know, your mother--”

“Yes, I know-- my mother, she saw that old woman coming for her and felt all warm and fuzzy about it--”

“Do you think it’s just a story I tell you?” he shot back.

She stared at him.

He relaxed. “She felt at peace.  Knowing that her life had been full and wonderful, that she had had her portion and it had been good.  And the best of it?  You.  She felt happy that she had brought you here.”

She just stared at him.  Ever since she was small, he kept telling her the story on the hope she would take it to heart.  He patted the discarded money purse she’d left on the bed.

“This is for tuition, board, and uniforms.  The weapons you have are fine for a student, so don’t go getting anything new.  And listen, Mirèille,” He leaned to the side to catch her averted eyeless gaze. “The city can be beautiful.  Exciting.  But those people do not know what real living is.  They pretend to life, with their irony and their stylish games-- but they are dead inside.  All of them.  Remember, always.  Every pretty thing in that city has a price with terrifying interest.”

He sighed and stood.  He gestured with wide arms, and though she hesitated and grimaced like she was doing him a favor-- she stepped into the hug.

Her wide head-growth tucked under his chin, he patted her on the back. “You are too young to go.  Not your skills, though; I have no doubt you will shame all of those upstart merchant’s children.  But I am reluctant to let you go.”

She patted him back. “Say what you want, just don’t go crying on me, Pops.”


	4. Culling Knife

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [On Tumblr.](https://ellebeebee.tumblr.com/post/170975870985/there-thou-goest-also)

She dreamed dreams not her own. **  
**

She dreams through decades of quiet heat in this quiet, hot, and harsh land with its black sea.  Of leaving, finally, to find the last part of herself.  She returns from the city with a husband and a seed in her belly, and she is more content than she has ever been.  She has seen the departures of these people of the yellow pastures in their white shrouds, and seen their arrivals in their bloody cauls.  She dreams dreams of her warm mahogany skin and her husband’s rich twilight.  Their mingling, and what they can bring forth.

She dreams of bed pains, of unimaginable pain between her thighs, and dizziness that spins the world until it is unmade.  She can see the individual threads of her husband’s sleeve gripped between her fingers.  She sees beyond him the strange eyes of a sheep-headed woman, the vertical pupils full of galaxies and adra gleam and a threshold-- the final threshold, and the very first.  The culling knife glows dull bronze in the candlelight.

Her daughter’s skin is purple, not brown.  Her head is not covered in black fuzz, but hard cartilage.  But she has never known such beauty, and she has never felt so content.

She dreamed that she fulfils her portion, and the next life is--

-

When she woke, Mother knelt beside her.

“Your mind called to me, Watcher.  The way they used to when they needed me at the Bell.”

Sharp pushed up on her elbows from her bedroll.  It was still mostly dark.  The emerald foliage radiated cold and damp all around them.

“No,” Sharp said. “It was my mother.  I do not know how, but I felt some sort of… trace of her soul.”

The adra chimes rang far away and very close all at once. “Her body struggled but her soul did not.”

“That is what my father tells me often.  Did you-- did you see the culling knife?”

She was quiet. “I have felt it enough to know it.  Even all the molding of her mind could still fail to save a mother in the end.” She paused. “The child was protected first.  Always.”

“But you did not… Nevermind,” she turned and studied her. “Did you ever… bring forth one like me?”

Mother’s hands weaved ringing with a harder melody than usual.  The white adra awash in blood-- too much blood.  Small embers you could touch but not feel.

“Once,” Mother said. “The babe fell into my hands like an ashen spark.  Precious and mewling and healthy.  A perfect light in the deep dawn.”

“And the mother?”

Her hands slowed in their circles, and the chimes sang a mourning knell.

Sharp looked out and watched the leaves go translucent against the tenuous light.  Their veins of yesterday’s sun spread into jade lace.  When she finally looked back, Mother had drifted away unseen.

-

She fell to her knees with the heavens beneath her, limitless stars and brushstrokes of divine color.  She did not fall or fly or float.  She just existed.  And the words spoke to her; true speaking that had nothing to with sound or expression or language.  She had not known truth before.  She’d come close to it, tried to create it herself from the scraps of shadows in the world.  But she’d been blind to the obvious.

She realized she’d already known it, all along.

The glittering expanse of Teir Evron revolved around her.

-

Edér tamped down on the fill in his pipe’s bowl.  He hummed vaguely to himself, sticking it in the corner of his mouth for a cold draw.  His hands patted down the pockets of his breeches and his waistcoat for a light.  As he found his little tin of matches, a breeze rushed through the Celestial Sapling’s enormous tree.  Thin switches ran and whipped against each other, and an ominous lament groaned somewhere deep within the trunk.

He waited a moment until the wind passed and struck his match.  The light burned against the night, fragile and small.  Some campfires burned in the district below, and watchfires dotted along the walls and in the hands of patrolling guards.

Edér leaned against the railing and nursed his pipe into fine smoking form; he took so long fiddling with it the guard changed once and a ruckus had broken out down in the bar and been smoothed over.

He drew on the deep acrid taste spilling from his bowl and breathed white tendrils into the dark.

“You are not asleep.”

Despite himself, he jumped.  Sharp stood behind him.  She’d come from the group’s rooms out onto the platform and its exterior rope ladder to the forest floor, conveniently away from the eyes and ears inside the inn.

“I’m bettin’ you already knew that,” he said.

She shrugged, and gave him a look.  Well, not really a  _look_ , because, you know-- the whole no eyes thing.  But sometimes she got this certain set to how she faced you, a certain tiny tilt.  There was the ‘Edér, shut up!’ tilt, the ‘Hiravias, shut up!,’ the ‘Durance, shut up before  _I_ shut you up!,’ and of course the ‘Eh, Pallegina, what is this word in their pigshit language, eh?’

This tilt was more along the lines of… What are you really doing here?

Edér shrugged. “I had a feeling.”

The dark blanket on the huts and paths flicked with the indistinct forms of hunters and merchants returning to their homes, climbing the hillocks to the other districts.  He felt the air shift as she leaned against the railing, too.  He offered her his pipe.  She accepted, and took a long and slow pull on it.

She breathed smoke into the night, and then turned the pipe around in her hand. “You laced this with whiteleaf?”

He nodded. “Just a touch.”

Sharp handed it back to him, shaking her head. “Not tonight.”

“You still up for that powdered snowcap when this is all done?” he said, patting his hip where he usually carried it on his absent belt.

“Yes.”

Her tone didn’t curl up in amusement, though.  She stared down at Twin Elms.  Edér took a few bitter drags and let the silence expand around them.

“I guess you’re decided then, huh?” he said.

She turned to him.  His eyes had long adapted to the murky darkness, and he could see she was all geared up in her leathers and softest boots, gloves tucked into her belt.  Her blades hung silent at her sides.

“So you know?” she said.

“I think we’ve all figured on it for a while now.”

“And what do you think of it?”

Edér tapped a boot quietly. “Well.  I’m not gonna say anything about that hat of yours.  I kinda fancy keeping my own head not bit off.  But I don’t think you should go getting yourself tied to one cart your whole life just because some tree ladies and Hiravias say you should.”

“But you are saying something about it then,” she said

He shrugged, and felt her watching him.

“On this, my thought has not changed,” Sharp said. “What I do has nothing to do with being--  _godlike_.” She bit around the word like a sour fruit.  She tapped her head-growth. “This is some trick of nature.  You think the gods, who control the heavens and the seas, death and life-- you think they spare more than a passing sneeze of thought for a single kith?  Even if I say, I serve this god now, it will make no difference to them beyond their vast plans.  It does not make me special.”

Edér nodded. “That’s the thing about faith, huh?  Sometimes don’t feel like ‘faith.’  At all.  Sometimes it feels like dog-paddlin’ in a big ocean of mud, all alone.  Doin’ your best to keep your head up.  And you wonder if you’re going the right direction.  If you’re strong enough to keep fightin’ the doubt.”

He nursed the pipe again.  Sharp remained quiet.

“And there’s no knowing,” Edér said. “There’s just… a feeling.”

And she had a tilt that he didn’t know too well: a release of tension and rounding of her straight shoulders and a near stillness in the constant whirl of her smoky tendrils.  He didn’t have to hear it from her to understand; he didn’t even know if she had the words to say.  Heck, he didn’t really either.  She believed in this.

Sharp stepped back from the railing and him.  That predator’s stance was back in her shoulders and limbs, and she pulled her gloves on.

“I have done bad things in my life,” she said. “I do not know if I can atone.  And I do not know if what I do in the future will be more of the same.  But I have to believe it.  I have to believe the path and the guide I follow is the right one.”

She flexed her gloved fist thoughtfully.  Edér’s thumb ran over the smooth wood of the pipe bowl.  She turned to him.

“I am going,” she said. “I will be back in the morning.”

“Alone?  You don’t want some help?”

“No,” she turned and a curl pulled at her lips. “I want to do it myself.  Beside, do not insult me.  Two little assassinations?  It is  _piece of cake_.”

“Hey, look at you!  Getting your sayin’s right.”

“Hey, Edér.  Go fuck yourself.  Did I get that right, too?”

He laughed, a little too loud, and she shushed him before disappearing into the night.

-

She made it through Breith Eaman and through Iovara’s teachings without slipping under its tide.  She cut down Thaos, and squeezed her “answers” from his soul without succumbing.  She faced the machine-- a neat and symmetrical ending to how this whole clusterfuck began-- and she felt the weight of thousands enslaved to the enormous mechanical fruit of a dead people’s avarice and gluttony and vanity.  She nearly drowned in all of those souls, and she wondered if she was already overwhelmed by such a small drop of the cycle, then how was it the gods carried all that had been, all that are, and all that would be.  A vast and utterly incomprehensible sea.

She did it, even with Iovara’s words, and it felt right.  And she tried to remember Edér’s words: a feeling.

That was all she needed.  And she felt it, until the greatest relief washed over her and weakened her to sleep’s beguile.

She made it up to the surface, and out of Twin Elms.  She made it through the goodbye's to the handful of companions departing directly after her great mission’s success.  She even made it all the way back to Caed Nua without falling to it.

But when she found a quiet and empty spot at the top of the tallest tower, an unseen bolt struck Sharp, clear through her heart.

She gasped and leaned into the stone wall, clutching at its coolness.  She shuddered and did what she hadn’t in a long time-- she can not cry, exactly.  Whatever was the mechanism for her sight, it did not function the same as others’ eyes.  It was a rhythmic spasming of the muscles that crushed her lungs and her throat, making her gasp and piercing her again and again and again with pain.

She felt naked.  Stupid and foolish that she had so quickly bent the knee to a god-- a, a  _thing_ that had never been real.

But what was  _real_?  She hated Aloth for his quick acceptance of it and his high-ground rejection of a make-believe authority.  She hated Edér for tempering his constantancy.  If even he…

She tried to remember her mother, covered in birthing sweat and lying in her deathbed, and how she had so clearly seen the glean of the culling knife.  She tried to remember the suspension in the heavens and the certainty she’d felt each time a soul slipped like silk between her fingers to be spun again on the Wheel.  She tried to remember that feeling in Sun in Shadow.

She pulled herself together.  The remainder of her companions departed.  She lingered in the library more, read more.  Petitioners and visitors came and went, coin passed through her hands.  Time continued on, even if she had uncovered a great revelation.  But if she commissioned a new cloak embroidered with a stylized skull and ewe horns tangled with a common farm knife and a wheel-- well.  It was something.

She would never know.  She could only feel.


End file.
